Posted
by
Soulskill
on Saturday August 16, 2014 @02:47PM
from the only-until-they-come-out-with-smellovision dept.

An anonymous reader writes: High-speed internet has become an everyday tool for most people, and cord-cutters have dramatically slowed the growth of cable TV, so this had to happen eventually: broadband internet subscribers now outnumber cable TV subscribers among the top cable providers in the U.S. According to a new report, these providers account for 49,915,000 broadband subscribers, edging out the number of cable subscribers by about 5,000. As Re/code's Peter Kafka notes, this means that for better or worse, the cable guys are now the internet guys. Kafka says their future is "selling you access to data pipes, and pay TV will be one of the things you use those pipes for."

Sure, but at least you get a chance to see what happened instead of having someone else unilaterally say "Open wide, here comes the news airplane!". Some is worse, but there's the possibility that some will be better.

I moved into this house 10 years ago. The cost for internet AND cable was 40. To get the same service now is 120. Exact same service. Was inflation 300% in that time? Dont think so. To get the digital stuff plus the rented remotes and receivers you are pushing 160.

The cost ratio is out of wack for what it is . People realize they can rent crap from redbox for 1-2 bucks. Or get it from netflix for 10-15 a month

None. I watch sports sporadically. Maybe a dozen NFL games, and once in awhile a special event like the Olympics or World Cup. However, I'm old enough to remember when that content was paid for purely by advertising. Now it still has advertising, so for me, the perceived value of being able to see these sports programs is pretty low. Certainly much much less per month than I pay for Netflix.

But then you had 50 crap channels you never watched along with the 5 that you did. Now there are 240 crap channels to go along with the 5 that you watch. Oh wait TLC is all reality shows and Discovery is pseudoscience crap so there are only 3 channels you watch now. But hey you have over 240 channels with nothing on now.

Many U.S. radio markets carry only conservative political talk shows on free radio, and people are willing to pay beaucoup bucks for a progressive counterpoint. And I wish you wouldn't use profanity in every single one of your replies to me.

I'm not convinced that it's necessarily harder to find a progressive viewpoint on radio than it is on TV. My guess is that people who pay for TV to listen to while they do chores either A) are interested in particular commentators who have TV shows but not radio shows, or (more likely) B) think cable TV is just "something you have" and haven't reexamined how much it costs or how much actual utility they're getting from it. It's one of those things that really only becomes clear in retrospect, after you've c

And this is what's wrong with our countries today. People all over the world fight and die for the right to hear and see news other than the officially approved ones, but we can't be assed to spend 10 minutes of our time to actually execute that right.

Why was the parent comment modded down? It looks fine to me. It sure isn't a goatse troll or something like that. It's on-topic, and makes some pretty good points. It gives a plausible explanation for why cable subscriptions are down and Internet usage is up. It's one of the better comments that have been posted so far. When I see really good comments like that modded down without justification, it makes me think that I'm at Reddit or Hacker News or Stack Overflow or some other intolerant discussion site li

That's why the governments should split those companies in two: ISP and TV/media providers. Otherwise, their TV/media half will just try to choke its own ISP half. With dinosaurs at the head of the cable companies, we already see it happening every day. They still firmly believe that "Internet" is just "interactive digital cable".

The cable ISPs that charge less for a TV plus Internet bundle than for Internet alone are part of the problem.

Not true. Internet+TV should cost less than internet alone, because it costs less for them to provide it. Cable TV shows are already sent over the cable, so the marginal cost of providing you with cable TV is precisely zero. But they get advertising money from the commercials, and they kick back some of that to their customers in the form of a discount. Basically, they are indirectly paying you to watch their ads.

A cable operator is allowed to replace a small number of commercials each hour with its own commercials. I'd be surprised if this number of commercials was enough to completely offset retransmission consent, especially on more expensive channels like ESPN and TNT.

Second, the claim "Internet + TV is cheaper than Internet by itself" was referring to a plan that included only basic cable (the channels you'd get with an antenna). Any plan that included the likes of ESPN and TNT would be more expensive than Internet-only (or at least, I sure would hope so!).

Third, Comcast's offerings have improved this year: last year I was at $40/month for Internet + basic cable ($37 once I found out that they were supposed to be giving me a di

Not all channels are owned by NBCU, and even after the proposed merger with TWC, not all cable TV systems are operated by Comcast. So Comcast still has to pay retransmission royalties to other networks. Besides, cable channels themselves have expenses, and NBCU has to pay some of those out of retransmission revenue from other cable TV systems as well as what it would have received from Comcast. So on paper, Comcast probably pays NBCU the market rate for retransmission to make the books balance.

I am such a customer. I have "basic local channels" from Time Warner because Internet would be more expensive without them. Of course, since they've switched to digital, I can no longer watch them without a box, which I refuse to pay for.

The cable ISPs that charge less for a TV plus Internet bundle than for Internet alone are part of the problem.

Yup. We were paying $135/month for a particular tier of Comcast's cable + internet service. We looked at going internet only, but for basically the same price ($70/month) we got internet, broadcast channels and HBO (and Discovery, but who cares). And it keeps my wife happy because she wants to watch all those cop and hospital dramas.

What's really maddening is how we got to $135 in the first place. It wasn't that long ago that our cable bill was closer to $80 for that same level of service. But Comcast kept

I think they believe that "Internet" is a gathering tool for gleaning information about the customer. The changes people see them making to ISP and TV access is strictly so usage data is added directly into data correlation processes.

Most shows are available online via Netflix, prime, on demand, etc...
Cable companies are behind the tech on purpose... To make money and screw people lol.. It's just a matter of time before they are forced to update...

Not true lots of my shows are available the same night they aired on their website or hulu. As for sports it's a different story but they are adding streaming on their websites. I know I can watch basketball live and nascar... I think you can start to watch baseball now as for football and hockey I am not sure...
Cable companies know what's coming they are gonna milk it and slow it all they can lol

The leagues' online services tend to impose a 48 hour delay if a game was shown OTA, on national cable, or on regional cable in your area. For non-sports programming on the network's web site or Hulu, this delay can be 8 days. Even this much delay renders a game irrelevant for the socialization that forms a part of office politics.

On demand TV is nice, but I wish there were some nice (Chrome compatible) channels available (Discovery, SyFi, History, etc). Sometimes just tuning to a channel and letting it run with whatever is on is enjoyable. And I'd be willing to pay a bit more a month for it as well, what I'm not willing to do is pay $40-80 a month for a over a hundred channels that I'll never watch just to get the dozen or so that I do when I can get most of what I want with Hulu/Netflix subscriptions for less than $20 a month (th

The broadband monopoly arises from exclusive rights to land, as the physical layer of the network has to cross non-subscribers' land to reach subscribers, and exclusive rights to radio frequency spectrum, which are put in place to keep a subscriber's signal from being drowned out by non-subscribers' nuisance signals. TV networks' monopolies arise from copyright, which a country can't just up and abolish without incurring severe trade sanctions from other WTO members. How would you recommend to get "the mono

Can we please kill cable and it's dumb "channels" yet? Can we do away with traditional radio stations and their paid-for playlists?

Simple answer : NO.

Longer answer: Not everyone wants to burn mobile data time just to listen to local radio stations while they are out and about. Besides mobile data issues, soon home bandwidth caps will shrink down to ludicrous levels, unless you are consuming the ( extra charge ) content from your provider.

The difference is that proponents of traditional mutichannel pay television can no longer assume the conventional wisdom that TV subscribers greatly outnumber Internet subscribers. So the news is that they're tied.

Fixed costs are a huge part of it. Internet service requires installation of wires, permission to install which costs the provider a lot of money. It also has the cost of physical wire maintenance, which involves support calls and may involve truck rolls for certain kinds of problem. These costs don't scale per megabit per second, unless you refer only to the ISPs' rationale for caps.

Cable television has to compete with OTA and satellite television. Cable Internet doesn't have to try as hard because cellular and satellite Internet have longer pings, slower throughput over a second, and far slower throughput over a month (often 5 to 10 GB/mo) that makes them useless for over-the-top VOD services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu Plus, and YouTube. Cell and sat ISPs are considered last resorts for areas not served by any wired ISP.

I admit I wasn't clear about the link between the two: Cable can take the costs of operating in a competitive market (television) and pass them onto a non-competitive market in which it also operates (home Internet).

Couldn't happen to a nice industry. From their overpriced content to their monopolistic channel bundling requirements imposed on cable providers, the sooner the media companies die the better for all of us. And then maybe our cable bills will stop going up at 4x the rate of inflation.

yes people are being forced to pay for that content, even if they only want basic internet connectivity. This even happens with ISP like AT&T, people who have copper only internet connection were force converted to "U-verse" customers

If it were not for the fact that my wife is a sports nut, I would have cut the cable long ago. As time goes on, the quality of the programming slides further and further downhill. Undoubtedly driven by the need to create cheaper and cheaper content.

Sports kind of ticks me off. Virtually everyone with cable has to pay for some of it, and yet if you *never* watch sports you still subsidize those who do want to watch it. My feeling is that sports is in a sort of bubble - costs have just risen too far, and

We're being hurt by the profit over anything else business model . Yeah, I have huge bills for TV and net, a land line and two cells. I used to have a antenna on my house to receive free TV and my RV has one so I can get local news and weather while on the road.
Net access is not a luxury but a necessity.
As a bonus, my electric company has the highest or nearly highest electricity rates in the US of A.

Congratulations, Leichtman Research Group you have figured out something that has simply been common knowledge among everyone else since 2005.I pay $150/mo for cable for one reason only, live streamed sports. For everything else, even if it's on cable, I have my system set up to download high quality encodings to my DVR automatically the moment they become available. Movies, everything coming up that I want gets put in the system and the moment a high quality release becomes available, automatically downloa